Actually, I sometimes enjoy this kind of thread, as even a do-my-homework question might unintentionally touch on a few interesting points within Perl.And if a thread happens to wander in that direction, it suddenly might show a few gems and interesting viewpoints from other monks. Sometimes an obvious, too-simple, naive or absurd opening question is required for this (zen) event to happen.

Kind of thread-hijacking. But I think the opening monk has to allow for hijacking when asking this kind of question. The potential for such gems (and me learning something interesting) IMHO more than outweighs both the harm to the community by a potential homework-troll and the harm to the potential homework-trolls skill level. Kind of an evil point of view :)

This time it was not so much learning but really fun to find out about a module successor to that unix tool rewrite in perl project (PPT, was it?). And that DOS copy + trick might prove useful to me one day.

Paraphrase: I care about us and knowledge, but not necessarily about the opener.

PS: Just stumbled upon Stupid stumpers and good questions from just before I joined. This thread raises similar points and also reflects on hidden gems inspite of or rather due to a monk's annyoance about openers and answers. What's that saying: On the Internet, it's always September. And September ended last week.

PS2: Stumbled on fellow monk audreyt's troll hugging report (probably best described as unsuspecting troll meats border collie - nice :))